venerdì 6 luglio 2012

NEW COLOR PICKER

Accessibility: a new color
picker for accessible web design

Accessibility is an important word in web design. Accessibility takes care of
those people who have impairments that make it difficult for them to access web
page information.
Typically, web sites providing services to citizens must be accessible
otherwise some people get discriminated because they cannot reach the services
others can easily.
Visually impaired people use tools called screen-readers to read web pages
aloud but this magic works only if the web page is designed accordingly to
accessibility specification.
WCAG 1.0 and now the latest WCAG 2.0 are W3C standards addressing these
difficulties among others.
One important accessibility issue is the color contrast between foreground and
background colors. Those colors must fulfill a constraint in order to minimize
visibility issues like deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia
and let the reading to be easy for everyone.
With this goal in mind the web designer needs to find color combinations that
are part of a color scheme pleasant for the final user, according with
the designer inspiration and fulfilling the accessibility standard.
On line there are some tools aiding to find the combination that matches all
those needs. Unfortunately, even if they are very useful, the work process is
the following: specify the base color, specify the second color and
check if they fulfill the requirements; if not, find another color and start
again.
Who, like me, doesn't like this way of working by trial and error, thinks this
is an un-necessary waste of time and they hopes for someone who will improve
those tools one day.
Now there is a new color picker out there which simplifies the way of choosing
the color combination: the accessibility color picker.
This very simple tool is based on the concept that, provided a base color
(either a background or a foreground), you pick only a corresponding
accessible color from the color map. You will be sure your choise is accessible
and you can focus only on how pleasant the two colors are. In other words, you
can focus on your creativity only, being sure every choise is accessible.
If you are a web designer, give it a try and let us know.